dripping fireflies
by angels entwined
Summary: It's like a romantic novel from the old days, before suicide and stalking became the real romance, set in a city circled with strings of lights and wannabe artists. / For Tigerlils, in the Caesar's Palace Back-to-School Fic Exchange.


_I don't know what I was thinking when I wrote this. It's this odd crackship (Vick/President Snow's granddaughter, yeah), sappy romance, random moments of. . .well, anyway, written for my forum niece, Tigerlils, for the Caesar's Palace Back-to-School Exchange. I hope you like it, darling; I own nothing._

* * *

They meet in a coffee shop that doesn't replace the sugar packets quickly enough and has an owner who's fiercely protective of its customers. It's like a romantic novel from the old days, before suicide and stalking became the real romance, set in a city circled with strings of lights and wannabe artists. He's a journalist and she's a painter who does it for the money.

She orders a peppermint cappuccino and he comes over to her table because everyone has heard of this girl, and because she ordered the least popular drink in the shop, which happens to be his favorite.

Her eyes, a bright and pretentious kind of jade, flick toward him. Her coat is splattered with paint and rain, hanging off of the back of her chair. It's an artist's coat. "What do you want?" she asks coolly, and drains her cup in one gulp, tipping her head back like she's taking a shot. Her curly brown hair dangles a few inches above the floor.

"Doesn't it hurt?" he asks, incredulous. Steam is still rising from the edges of the cup, blurring the image of his notebook laid out on the table, flipped to a blank page with a watery stain on it.

She raises an eyebrow, her fingers splayed out on the table. They drum against the polished surface impatiently. "Does what hurt?"

"The coffee—it's really hot," he explains awkwardly as the steam dissipates. "People don't like it partly because it's maybe a thousand degrees Fahrenheit."

A faint laugh bubbles to her lips as she relaxes, and he decides she looks quite pretty with that softening twinkle in her eyes. Not that it's easy to see any expression with those contacts blocking it, but he's searching as best as he can. "You came here to talk about coffee?" she asks, glancing at his notebook. "It is hot, yes, but I've felt far more pain.

She leans forward slightly, causing him to notice the purple paint spots on her chest (or rather, what's beneath them), then reminds himself those are probably fake and that's not why he's here, anyway. "Do you know what they say about champagne? It's like drinking the stars. Well, I don't want to end up stumbling drunk and dumped in a stranger's house, so I drink coffee and it has the same burn. Like stars. Oh, and I know where you're looking—they aren't fake."

At this, he collides with the back of his chair and meets contact with the floor a few seconds afterward. She snorts at his embarrassed expression. "It's fine. I really never thought I was pretty enough for that, though." She waves for the waiter and snatches another peppermint cappuccino off the tray that's presented to her.

"By the way," she adds as he scrambles to his feet, "you're paying for this one if you want an interview."

He stares at her blankly, then nods because no one's gotten an interview with her since she was ten years old, and his boss is paying him a good deal of money for this. A coffee is a small price to pay.

"Okay," he begins, taking a sip of water from his plastic cup. The ice cubes wander around the surface and he almost chokes when he swallows one. "What do you think of the Capitol?"

"Same answer as a decade ago," and really, it was eleven years ago, but he doesn't correct her.

"I don't know what that answer is. I was barely a teenager."

The woman blinks, poking a straw into her coffee. "I thought you would have known, being Vick Hawthorne—your brother seems to know everything about the rebellion. More reason to get angry at the Capitol, I suppose." He knows she isn't talking about Rory.

"Well, I couldn't care less," she says after a somewhat awkward pause. "My first memory is of District Seven, when they whisked me away to the lovely land-of-trees—" The words blur together in her mouth. "—to protect me from the rebellion. Terrible protection, really, since they could target me more easily behind enemy lines. I don't even remember the Capitol."

It's sad that everything she's known for, she doesn't know a thing about herself.

At the end of the interview, she says finally, "It was nice talking to you, Mr. Hawthorne, although the peppermint cappuccino was nicer. I know your boss personally, and he happens to hate everything Capitol with a passion, so he won't be happy when he finds out Snow's granddaughter, of all people, doesn't plan to rebel against the new regime. I hope you don't get fired."

She is sarcastic and condescending and unsympathetic when he realizes yes, his boss wants something much more exciting and he doesn't know how to spin this, and her answers are anticlimactic (but personally fascinate him, but no one else cares). Her attitude is just the smallest bit like Katniss', but not much.

She obliges when he asks for her address and says, "Maybe we can discuss the benefits of peppermint cappuccinos and put in an article. I'm sure people might listen to it and burn their tongues off; that'd be interesting."

* * *

A week later, he reaches her apartment and knocks on the door, but it swings open instead. Tentatively, he steps inside, and sees her painting. An easel is set up in the middle of her room, a tarp with pots of paint covering half the floor. The amount of colors is ridiculous, and it's almost impossible to walk freely through the room without spilling paint.

It's surprising to see she looks utterly bored as she dips her brush in a pot of pale yellow paint—the color of the sun's corona, it looks like. She applies it delicately to her canvas, a picture of a girl observing a jar of fireflies.

"Your door wasn't locked," he says from behind her, hoping he doesn't startle her. Melodia Snow is the kind of person who whips out a knife and stabs the first human she finds when she's startled.

She twitches slightly, but doesn't turn. "There's no point; my last house was swallowed in flame. If we burn, you burn with us, and all that. If someone is out to kill me, and that's the only type of person I'm worried about, the door won't stop them." She smears part of the painting in black and swirls her brush in a cup of water.

"I'm sorry."

"Did you know you're the first person who's said that?" she asks rhetorically, adding a few smudges of green. The whole painting already seems perfect to him, but she looks dissatisfied. "I'm sure everyone has had it worse after the rebellion, so they don't bother saying anything sympathetic. Life's not much more than a contest to see whose days suck the most, I suppose."

She finally turns around, dabbing one last bit of dark green on the grass. "You know, you _are _Vick Hawthorne. I bet you've had it pretty bad."

"So have you," he replies. "I bet your problems weren't too small, either. I visited you the day you went to your brother's gravestone, right?"

Everyone knows of the older Snow that had been less than pro-rebellion, and three years ago, he'd led a riot with forty other Capitolites and tried to kill the Mockingjay. The girl standing in front of him visits her brother's grave monthly.

"Yes," she replies. "But you saw your friends dying around you when they set Twelve on fire."

"The Capitol was pretty much on fire too," he argues, "and my friends managed to survive."

"I thought life wasn't a contest on whose days suck the most," she says, lifting the painting off the easel and setting it by the window. Sunlight pours onto the canvas as she drops her paintbrush carelessly onto the tarp.

He shifts from foot to foot and doesn't respond, so she asks, "Why are you here?"

"I—I thought we could discuss the benefits of peppermint cappuccinos."

For a moment, she glances down at her chest, and his cheeks redden with mortification at the memory. Then she says, "As a date?"

"As fellow coffee lovers with similar tastes," he says, sounding a hundred percent serious.

She fixes him with those too fake but really quite beautiful eyes of her. "Good, because I don't date," she says firmly, and really, he's not surprised (_butmaybealittledisappointed_). Her past fifteen years have been nothing but people hating her for her heritage; a boyfriend is not something she's going to want, and no one else would be too willing. "And you're paying."

"I just got fired!"

A sweet smile plasters itself onto her face. "I know—I saw it in the papers." Then the smile disappears and she points at her painting. "I don't have any money until I get that sold."

"None?"

"Maybe enough for another canvas," she admits reluctantly. "But until then, no food or anything like that."

He hesitates, then figures a Melodia Snow in debt isn't going to do much, and he knows people can get quite cranky without their coffee, and a girl like her doubly so. At least he hasn't had to worry too much about food since the rebellion ended.

"Okay," he says at last, "but tell me why. . .why the girl in the painting looks like that." She's clearly a Capitolite, with pale blue hair and black skin studded with diamonds like stars in the night sky. Her expression, though, is haunting—apathetic, empty, like this is all that's left. There's no real emotion in her.

Her fingers curl into fists, and he wonders if he's said something wrong. Then she says, "My first memory is that, because that's how to get a painting sold. They say my memories 'humanize' me." Her tone is disdainful as she fixes her eyes on the painting, and she laughs humorlessly. "They have more feeling, I suppose."

For a brief second, he looks at the hardness in her expression and agrees that yes, these pictures are all that make her human. Then he mentally steps on his own foot and reminds himself everything about her is human—she is not just a Capitolite.

As an afterthought, she adds, "When I left Seven, I brought a jar of fireflies with me, even though the bugs died. It was destroyed when they set fire to my house. That girl isn't me, though, at least. They don't get everything."

* * *

Together, they drink the coffee version of stars, though he still doesn't have the courage to drain it all at once. The spicy taste of mint burns his tongue enough. He offers to take her to District Seven next week in Rory's car—the middle Hawthorne brother works as an engineer in Twelve—and he kisses her cheek when he drops her off at her apartment that night. He tells her to bring a jar to catch the fireflies in.

Then he hurries out before she reacts and closes the door a little too loudly. He tells himself this is all purely platonic.

* * *

The next week, he shows up on her doorstep wondering if she's going to run out screaming telling him to never come back. She answers his knock on the door—he hadn't barged in, possibly to show her he wasn't one of those set out to kill her—and says, "Your lips feel like stars."

She stifles a laugh at his expression, sliding into the car with an almost smug grace compared to his clumsy, jerky movements. He's stuck in mortified silence for the next hour and a half to the gate of District Seven.

They find a spot full of glowing fireflies near a picnic table. If nothing else, the country of Panem has gotten much prettier, in a modest and less Capitol-like way, since the rebellion. The district she lives in, Six, is now a large and much less industrialized city called Creans—"create"—and Seven is more of a very large park. The sky is too dark for anyone to notice two small celebrities arriving.

It's possibly the most romantic setting they've both ever seen. He looks ready to hurl on the trees.

They're silent for the next hour or so, catching and releasing fireflies because she doesn't particularly want corpses in her jar a day from now. "There's something beautiful about a dead firefly," she notes afterwards, inspecting the bugs spilling light onto the glass of their jars. "But that light just extinguished. . .I don't want that. I've had enough tragedies in my life." She sets the jar on the table.

He glances anxiously away from her while thinking she sort of says really amazing things for someone who's supposed to be shrieking about chipped nail polish, according to the stereotypes. The first thing he sees is a couple in the next clearing on top of each other, trying to eat the other's face off, and he has to stare up into the sky and pretend all is calm. Pretend, so he stifles a panic attack.

The sacrifices a friend (_definitely a friend_) has to make.

As if she's telepathic and sadistic, the latter of which he's beginning to think is almost certainly true, she says drily, "I was sort of twisting the truth when I said I don't date. It's more like I have brief kisses behind closed doors and leave people's hearts in pieces."

And he isn't planning to play along, but he blurts, "It would be an honor to have my heart broken by you."

For the first time, she sends him a real smile. If she's sort of pretty when her eyes look alive, she's beautiful when she smiles. "All right, as long as I get to do it."

Anyone who breaks her heart is probably going to be mysteriously found in a ditch a decade later, he thinks, giving her his fireflies.

* * *

Later, after giving the car back to his brother and an exhausting twelve-hour drive, his brother demands details. He has neither the easy charm that lets him dodge the subject like Rory or the stubborn willpower of Gale, so he spills out the whole story. It feels fragmented and ridiculous in his mouth, and he realizes for a journalist, he's pretty bad at storytelling.

His brother spends the next half hour rolling on the floor, clutching at his stomach, and generally trying to calm his hysterics. Vick stiffly stays rooted to the spot, his eyes closed in exaggerated patience.

"Snow," the older man sputters, still not used to _not _saying the name of the former president. "One brother falls in love with the Mockingjay, the other falls in love with the very opposite definition of her."

"She doesn't care about Katniss."

At this, he finally gets up, shaking his head as he dusts off his clothes. There are several stains and patches of dust on his carpet; it looks like Melodia chucked a pot of black paint at the floor and dumped some open sugar packets on it for good measure. "Vicky, don't be so naïve. She does care—the Mockingjay represents the rest of Panem, her brother's death, her parents' deaths—Katniss indirectly helped the world in ruining her life. She's just not _politically_ against her."

Vick can't help but dislike the assuming, smug tone in his brother's voice, but he agrees. Then, hesitating, he says, "Don't tell Gale."

Rory pats him sympathetically on the back. "'Course I won't. He'd skin you alive. A _Capitolite._"

"We don't get choices on who we fall in love with," and the other man's face falls as he recalls how much he would have liked to fall in love with a girl that didn't have blonde braids and a porcelain frame that was shattered to pieces. A girl whose fate didn't end in death. At the same time, he wouldn't trade her for anyone else. As much as Vick wants to dismiss it as a childhood crush, a girl you kiss on your second meeting—even if it's not on the lips—sounds like nothing more than a silly, flirtatious fling. If he doesn't want to dismiss his own love, he can't dismiss Rory's.

* * *

"I don't really like painting," she says one day, twining her fingers in his hair. It's an oddly affectionate gesture, and he's keeping very, very still, like she's a snake who will pounce otherwise.

He's not surprised by this comment—he thinks her work is gorgeous, but empty. It's beautiful, organized nonsense. There's no real passion in the bored look she wears when she's painting.

"But Creans is a city of painters," she continues, "and it lets you get your clothes dirty without having to buy new ones. And I'm okay at it, and it's easy. . ." She hasn't had her coffee today, so her eyelids drift closed. Her fingertips slip from his hair as she curls up on the couch.

They've been talking (having "brief kisses behind closed doors" that are neither brief or closed) for three months, and he changes the subject as he thinks of the envelope he'd received in the mail. "I want you to meet my family tomorrow."

She isn't on her guard, barely paying attention to what he's saying. Moonlight spills through the window, a companion to the warm summer breeze that carries itself in and tickles his face. "Hm?"

"They're gathered in District Two for Gale's birthday," he says as quickly as possible. Miraculously, she's still not catching onto the fact she's meeting his fiery, anti-Capitol brother soon. "It's a two-hour train ride, and they paid for the tickets—they said to bring a friend. Will you go?"

She turns on her side, her breathing heavier and slower. She looks so vulnerable compared to the cynical, cutting girl he knows, it hurts. "Run down to the store and get me the coffeemaker I ordered, and okay," she says, thrusting a receipt at him. "I spent the next three days' worth of meal money for the thing."

Someday, she's going to break his heart, as promised, by eloping with her coffee.

* * *

The next day, she very clearly remembers her promise, and she very quickly realizes he'd taken advantage of her sleepy state. While trying to brew coffee—it's an old invention recently brought back by District Three—she shouts at him for manipulating her, then agrees a promise is a promise and she'll come anyway, but only to sink her nails into his throat the moment so much as a hateful glance is sent her way. In front of his family.

He's almost certain she's not joking; he tries to assure her his brother is really in fact not that bad, and she doesn't believe him for a second.

"This isn't Rome and Julia, and Gale isn't the Montagues. He isn't the antagonist."

She throws her head back and swallows a cup of thousand-degree coffee with no sugar, the cup itself still as hot as a fire, and barely even blinks as she turns to face him. "Then who is?" she demands, because in a situation like this, there is _always _a villain.

"Life."

"Don't get all philosophical on me now," she snaps, draining another cup and slamming it onto the kitchen counter. She stalks out the door, forgetting to turn off the coffeemaker. A pound of coffee beans slides off the counter with a loud thud; she spent another day's worth of meals on buying it.

He worries about her. She snaps at him for doing so.

* * *

A girl with hair the color of a jumble of autumn leaves waits for them at the station—Posy, she calls herself, the youngest Hawthorne. There's a few years between the women—less than there is with her and Vick (three), and he wraps a comforting arm around his sister's shoulders. She has a smile like the clear blue days in Seven and the same green eyes as—

"I'm not his fiancee. We haven't known each other that long," Melodia says icily, and he narrows his eyes at her less than kind tone. She hasn't forgotten that she doesn't trust people, and his relatives don't get any kind of immunity.

Posy takes her attitude in stride, laughing as her brother comments, "But long enough it's impressive you haven't broken my heart yet." The redhead fingers the frayed edge of her scarf as she leads them to Gale's home a half-hour walk away from the station, and Melodia finds herself wishing she had hair like that instead of the plain, mousy brown she's dyed her hair. Unless the Mockingjay favors you, no sane Capitolite walks around looking like what they are, because it's considered a show of support for the period between the Dark Days and the rebellion. All the shades of red are too gaudy, though, and she can't afford new dye anyway.

Hazelle Hawthorne greets them warmly at the door, a sweet woman like Posy with a less pronounced shade of hair, more of a reddish-brown. Her hands are red and raw, and it's obvious she's worked hard. The lazy flow of chatter floats through the hallway. Rory and Gale.

Vick reaches for her hand, but she jerks away from him, building up her composure. She is not weak, and she doesn't need anyone, and she doesn't care about anything, including the people waiting for her.

Melodia Snow marches onward, head held high, and the air pulses with electricity.

* * *

On the train ride home, she's quiet, and it's upsetting to see how she doesn't even seem angry at him. She slumps in her seat, worn out, and her lips move soundlessly to form nonsense words.

"If I told you I loved you whether you were Snow's granddaughter or not, would you talk?"

She stares out the window; the day is gray with a fading light in the sky and the trees blur by until they look like a solid wall of murky green and brown.

"I owe you a thousand peppermint cappuccinos for going to meet my family."

"That's why I permitted the interview, actually," she says, not turning from the window, but some warmth returns to her voice—well, if she had any in it to begin with. "I didn't have enough money to pay for my own, and I quite wanted one."

Her reflection in the window looks amused at his expression. "I apologize for shattering your romantic visions of love at first sight. If I have a love at first sight, it's coffee."

He exhales sharply, releasing some of the tension he's built up. There's a light tapping sound on the window when a branch scrapes it. "Always knew you were cheating on me."

She taps her fingers on the glass, leaving faint smudges. "That term was retired decades ago. I just don't want to meet your brother again, okay?"

He nods; now that his brother's met Melodia, it's not likely he's eager to see her again. "It's not Rome and Julia," he repeats to himself.

She pauses, and oh, he's done something wrong _for sure— _"It's actually Romeo and Juliet. And I hope not, since they die at the end."

He thinks of the grave she's visited four times now in the period he's known her, and he leans his head against his armrest. His head hurts, maybe because of the shouting episode his family had with each other, and asks, "When you said your family never cared about Snow, what did you mean?"

Her fingers dance over the back of the chair in front of her, flashes of pale color over the dark blue of the headrest. "My mother," she says quietly, "as far as I can tell, was a sociopath. My brother is a reliable source, at any rate, and her father told her to trust no one. This extended to him eventually; she hated him. She wanted to make a name for herself, not just as Snow's daughter, and eventually broke off from him. It wasn't Snow who sent us to Seven—it was her, one of his political enemies, and she was gathering power, which is why he sent someone to kill her."

Vick's grandparents died years ago of a lung disease come from too much time spent digging through the mines, and he can't imagine either one of them trying to kill his mother. "I'm sorry."

"Don't be. You should never judge a person you don't know, but she killed a dozen people on her way up the political ladder and I can't say I remember her." Contempt flashes in her eyes, and if she's not human, he hardly blames her. The only person who cares about her is rotting in the ground.

"It is better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all," he recites, and it comes out as rushed and unsteady as an avalanche, but he thinks it's true, even if he's much more skeptical about random quotes come from nowhere than he used to be.

She stares vacantly at the ceiling. "You're not like your brothers, Vick Hawthorne. They burn much brighter than you do, and talk about Shakespeare and you're a journalist, and you don't have a temper."

Wondering if this is a good or bad thing, he says, "I thought it was Shakes-fear."

"Shakespeare. I heard Romeo and Juliet was all the rage in the Old Capitol, where you actually knew who he was. Killing yourself was the most romantic thing you could do, they said." She glances at him, though he's beginning to nod off. "Naturally. I've lived twenty-one years of my life without you, and I'll probably live three times that."

"I've lived twenty-five," he mumbles, managing to sound smug at this dubious accomplishment, and lapses into sleep. It is possible a million times twenty-one will never be enough time to be with her, he thinks in his dreams.

* * *

Creans is modeled after an Italian Renaissance city; after Peeta Mellark and the morphlings of the Quell, the district took it upon themselves to become Panem's art center. The two return to a city of glitter and flowing rivers, because of course that's artistic. The bridges seem ready to crumble beneath their feet, newly built with materials of questionable quality, and winter is coming in a spray of snowflakes and frost.

"They're building canals," she observes, her feet swinging like a child's as she sits by the edge of the river. A small boat with sails like paper glides by. "Like Venice, before it sunk into the ocean. Smart—they built Six near a river, though there was a wall at first to it before they tore it down. The district runs on hydroelectricity; it's a good method of transportation without cars."

Two inches more, and she'll topple into the river. She doesn't know how to swim, and she's not afraid to fall.

They stand up, heading towards her apartment. There's not much point, as she's stayed with him since they returned and found her walls and furniture melted to ash. It's a large, gaping space between the two apartments next to her ("I'll miss my paints; it took forever to arrange all of them in color wheel order. What a waste."), and she wants a picture so she can paint it.

"This is one memory I'm glad to sell," she notes, picking up a glass jar. In the glow of city lights, little orange marks reflect against it. It looks like it's dripping fireflies.

* * *

He's thumbing through newspapers at the cafe alone, fingertips smeared with fresh ink as he scribbles notes in the margins. All of them are recent; they only started publishing newspapers five years ago in Six, and they've embraced it. There's a neverending flow of papers; the one he's looking through was printed only half an hour ago.

He takes a sip of his coffee; he still doesn't have the nerve to drink them burning hot. One headline blares out at him, though it's tiny and on the second page. He skims the rest of the article and drops his cup, and a waitress sends him a disapproving look.

_This afternoon, Melodia Snow, granddaughter of the ex-president Coriolanus Snow, was assaulted on the street. Her injuries were reported to be serious, but not fatal, and she currently resides at the city hospital—_

* * *

The hospital smells of disinfectant and the metallic tang of blood that's more of a taste. The fluorescent lights don't have the blurry glimmer of the city, they're just painfully bright yellows and whites that scratch at his eyelids. _These aren't on the color wheel, _her voice whispers to him in the back of his mind. A thousand pinpricks of (they shouldn't be) color dot the ceiling.

He's not allowed to see her, says the doctor with his clipboard, because he's not a relative.

"All of her relatives are dead." Vick shoves the doctor aside and flings the door open. "You should know the Capitolites haven't got it that easy, either." No one tries to stop him because he's the brother of the Mockingjay's (former) best friend.

In her hospital bed, her dark hair is fanned out on the pillow and the ticking of the heart monitor is unsteady. Her breathing is shallow, barely even there, when she sees him. Blood ripples out onto her sheets, flowing freely with no resistance.

They won't help her because of who she is; she'll bleed out soon. "Bring flowers to my grave," she says. "Whorls of them. If I get a grave."

He does not laugh. He turns to the nearest nurse and says, "My name is Vick Hawthorne, and if you don't help her, I'm calling Katniss Everdeen."

It works. He's bluffing, of course—he has no idea if Katniss would help him. If they're going to use Melodia's status as a plausible reason for anything, he's going to use his own.

As he waits by her bed, arms crossed so he looks more intimidating (really, he's in pieces), he says, "I can't afford any flowers, by the way." There's bloody gashes on her arms and face (not to mention she may never see out of one eye ever again), and while he supposes it would be very sweet to kiss her then, he's pretty sure you can get diseases from touching someone else's blood.

They fix her up and tell her she can't drink coffee because it raises her blood pressure or keep skipping meals for coffee because, well, self-explanatory. She replies they can go do something anatomically unlikely with themselves before sagging onto their pillows.

"You aren't going to keep drinking it, are you?" he asks, hovering anxiously over her.

"No. I won't kill myself over love, like I said."

It's nice to know she probably prioritizes coffee over him.

She takes out her contacts; they're the decorative kind that clouds her vision rather than helps it, and with weakened eyesight, she can't afford to wear them anymore. He sees her eyes, sees what's in them for the first time, and it's not bitterness.

It surprises him, just a little.

* * *

"If I said I wanted to get married—"

She glances up and kisses him for all of two seconds, and he decides all kisses are a little like stars.  
"Ball and chains, marriage." She tugs him along.

For the first time in three years, she's invited him on her monthly trip. Winding a frayed patchwork scarf around her neck, she strides through the streets, him trailing uncertainly behind her. This is possibly the worst way to celebrate her birthday that he can think of.

They stop at the cemetery gate—it's always open, she says matter-of-factly, because it's a graveyard for Capitolites, and the people who care enough to visit them don't matter. He wonders if he's one of those people now.

It's nighttime, and there's been a rainstorm recently. The middle of summer is humid and intense and hyperactive, even, if it was a person, and most of the lights nearby are being fixed. She walks past five rows of graves, treading lightly because there are ghosts here and she won't disturb the dead.

Together, they kneel in the damp mud, and he places the whorls of flowers he's brought ("at least they're not for me") by the faded carving on the headstone as she runs her hands over the words. Crushed, wilting petals from months and years before flutter limply as a breeze stirs them.

She tells her brother goodbye. He points to the little lights drifting in the air. "It's dripping fireflies."

After a few minutes of solemn silence, he asks, "It wouldn't be very romantic if I proposed in the middle of a cemetery, would it?"

"No," she replies, "but I imagine I'd say yes."


End file.
